United Nations Multimodal Convention defines multimodal transport as follows: “'International multimodal transport' is the carriage of goods by at least two different modes of transport on the basis of a multimodal transport contract from a place in one country at which the goods are taken by the multimodal transport operator to a place designated for delivery situated in a different country”. An example of multi-modal transportation could include a container being loaded from a trailer truck into a vessel and from the vessel into rail transportation in the destination harbour.
Tracking devices are electronics used for observing object movements and supplying timely ordered sequence of respective location and sensory data to depict the motion of goods. Tracking devices can include a location detecting system, such as satellite based positioning systems, for example Global Positioning System (GPS), Global Navigation Satellite System (GLONASS), GPS aided Geo Augmented Navigation (Gagan) or other GPS, microcontroller and radio transmitter/receiver system communicating frequently upstream to provide information for remote computer unit.
Tracking devices are mounted on material handling units such as transport containers. The challenges with currently available systems are two-fold: Firstly, on global transportation routes, the transport containers are placed in locations with limited location system coverage, for example pallets placed in metallic sea containers or sea containers placed under the metallic deck of a container ship. In these kind of conditions can exist under a so called Faraday shield phenomena causing serious operation problems for example to GPS based tracking. Secondly, in the radio communication to remote computer unit, the monitoring performance of the tracking device status is similarly limited or non-existing.
Vehicles on road and rail, as well as airplanes and seagoing vessel can be equipped with special tracking systems capable of sending location information to external computers. Truck companies have introduced such solutions for fleet management. For sea-going vessels, AIS (Automatic Identification System) provides similar information available in the Internet. Commercial aviation flights can be tracked similarly by using data provided by airplane transponder systems. These specific solutions are using advanced location devices with constant satellite visibility.
Known tracking applications suffer from lack of successful integration methods between different tracking environments and systems. This can cause practical problems for an international user because up-to-date and correct tracking information is available only occasionally.